Beschreibung:

Introductio in Ptholomei Cosmographia[m] cu[m] longitudinibus et latitudinibus regionum et civitatum celebriorum.
Krakow: Florian Ungler, [1512]. Small 4to (197 x 140mm). 46ff. [4], 36 (i.e. 38). Full-page woodcut of armillary sphere, half-page woodcut of the quadrant, numerous five- to twelve-line woodcut initials, tables and printed marginalia. Full calf, spine lettered in gilt. Condition: without the world map (rarely present), margins shaved close with loss to marginalia and foliation, minor worming throughout affecting some text, mild dampstaining. Provenance: Harrison D. Horblit (his bookplate, now lost) Acquisition : H.P. Kraus, catalog 185, 1990 (but 1998), item 18, $13,200. first edition of a highly important and controversial early americana, containing a description of the isthmus of panama before balboa’s “discovery” of the same. the horblit copy. With passages on Amerigo Vespucci and his famous voyages, and excerpts of geographical works by Aeneas Silvius, Isidorus, Paulus Orosius, and the Polish friar Anselm; of special note herein is the description of the South Sea a full year before Vasco Núñez de Balboa’s voyage in 1513, a passage that has led to controversy since its publication; and questions remain about the map’s predating Balboa’s “discovery.” Stobnicza held the chair of Cosmography at the University of Krakow. The map often found bound into the work is based on an inset border detail in Waldseemüller's 1507 famous world map Universalis cosmographiae and is found in just 4 of the 21 copies known worldwide (Vienna, Munich, Breslau, J.C. Brown). As with many works in this period the insertion of a world map into the text of selected copies seems to have been common practice and therefore there is much speculation about whether the map was issued with this work at all. There are two issues of the first edition: with and without a date to the colophon, the latter (the present copy) is the rarer. Yarmolinsky counts just six such copies worldwide. Yarmolinsky, Early Polish Americana (1937), 15-30; Estreicher 29, 301-02; Nordenskiöld, Facsimile Atlas , pp.68-69, 100, pl. 34; Harrisse 69 and Add. 42; Sanz, Ult. Ad., 703-704; Sabin 91866; JCB I, 54.